All the pine needles on our living room floor suggest our Christmas tree’s days are numbered. Fortunately, Boy Scout Troop 1 is offering its annual Christmas tree pick-up service on Saturday.
All you have to do is make an appointment by 7:00 pm on Friday — send email to Troop1Trees@gmail.com or call 508-626-8015 — and then leave your tree at the end of your driveway by 9:00 am on Saturday. The boy scouts will do the rest.
The service is a fundraiser for the scouts. Suggested donations are $10 for large trees and $5 for small trees. You can put your donation in a plastic bag and clip or tape it to the top of the tree.
If you’re not quite ready for the holidays to end, the Boy Scouts will also pick up trees on Saturday, January 9.
Does anyone know what the Scouts will be doing with the trees? Hopefully “dispose of” doesn’t mean what it sounds like – just throwing them in the landfill – very wasteful. Ideally, they – and anyone else, whether they use the Scouts’ service or not, would compost them or do something similar that would get some additional use out of them.
A few ideas for what to do with a Christmas tree to be more environmentally responsible, many of which I’ve done myself (when we used to have a Christmas tree – we’ve taken to not having one and Christmas is no less great without it):
– cut it up and compost the smaller branches & cut the trunk into firewood (it will need to dry out & season before burning well)
– before composting them, you can use the branches with needles on them to blanket and protect any delicate or important plants in your garden for the winter – then compost them in the spring
– If you don’t have a need or way to do either of these things, perhaps a garden center will take it as a donation and be able to make use of it for these or other similar things.
One follow up – of course, if you’re going to compost your tree, it’s best to get any remaining tinsel off of it, so if you choose to use tinsel you may want to consider using a type (like the long, reusable strands, rather than the little individual strands) that can be easily removed and re-used. Not only will this save you from having to buy new tinsel each year, it will keep more plastic/mylar, etc out of landfills. My own suggestion would be to go without tinsel – the tree can still look great without it. And as I mentioned above, there is the option of not having a tree at all – we’ve had Christmas without a tree for 3-4 years now and have enjoyed it just the same.
Well, the boys put ALL the trees in the compost area of the transfer station. Having the scouts do it for you save you the hassle of doing it yourself AND provides the boys some fundraising money that they are smartly saving for the trip they hope to take to Alaska in 2 years. The Scouts work very hard on a lot of community service project by assisting with the food pantry, veterans groups, shoveling, not to mention the countless eagle projects that have benefited the community. Both Troops in town are VERY conscientious of the environment.
Oh, and by the way – don’t burn pine in your fireplace. It create creosote which can build up in your chimney making it unsafe.
Good to know that they are composting the trees, and yes, I agree with supporting the scouts. Good point on the pine burning too.
We grind our tree and use it as salad sprinklings all year round! At first we used an electric grinder to do this, but when we thought about how much coal was burned to run the grinder, we switched to a hand-grinder I found in an old mill in Lowell. But then someone pointed out that the girls who used to operate that grinder were undoubtedly oppressed, so we could no longer use it in good conscience. Now we simply leave the tree up all year and tear off a hunk around dinner time. Mmm-mm! Sure, we get spinters in our mouths – but our teeth are tough as all get out.
Well, it’s good to see you’re being conscious in your decision-making, at least.
There’s one (at least) in every crowd…
Did the tree pickup go as scheduled on Saturday? Ours didn’t get picked up (I sent an email Friday morning), and I’ve gotten no answer from the email or phone number provided. Anyone have any info?
Yes – the tree pick-up did go on as planned, despite the weather – my boys participated. I will pass along that a tree was missed and perhaps a remedy can be arranged. If not, there is another pick-up planned for this coming Saturday. That is, if your tree can wait patiently…:)
Heard back from them today and got it all figured out. Thank you!
Thanks to Troop 1 for picking up our Christmas Tree!